“Joe,” I said casually, after a small silence, “you know . . . I’m inclined to take you up on that offer you made me.”
“Sure enough, you bet.” Then asked casually, after a large mouthful of toast, “Just what offer was that?”
“To give me a chance to witness first hand the power of your faith in action, to visit your church for Saturday services . . . don’t you recall?”
“Yeah! the church! you come! oh man
yeah!
But it ain’t exactly a church, I mean it is a church, but it ain’t exactly—you know, steeples and stained-glass windows and pulpits . . . it’s more sort of a
tent
is what it actually is. A tent? huh?” He uttered a short laugh of dawning wonder. “Yeah, that’s what it is—a tent—how about that?”
“Apparently your cathedral’s architecture has never impressed itself on you before.”
“But, hey, Lee, listen, one thing. Jan an’ me wasn’t planning to come right back out. It’s Halloween, for one thing; I aim to give the kids a chance to trick-or-treat a little bit tonight.”
“Yes, Leland,” Jan corroborated in a small voice, “we’ll be going over to our new place after church. To paint some in the kitchen. But you’re of course welcome to spend the day there an’ come back with us tonight.”
“Shoot a monkey, yes!” Joe Ben snapped his fingers. “You ever paint much, Lee? Why it’s a
gas
, you know? It’s prime fun! Swarp swarp. A wave of the hand and bright
red!
orange! green . . . !”
“Off-white an’ morning mist an’ pastel green, Joe dear.” Jan toned down his hues.
“Sure! But what do you say, Lee? If you can handle a brush—we’ll give you a sort of try-out, to see if you’re equal to it first—but if you are . . . it’d be a
nice
way to fill the wait.”
I told him that I was afraid that, after a session with Brother Walker, I might be a bit too unsteady to wield a sure brush, but gave him the names of a few other fellows I knew who might be interested. . . .
“Joe Harper? Huck who? Lee, them boys
town
boys?”
“A joke, Joe, forget it.”
Which he immediately did as he launched into an enthusiastic description of the plans he had for his bathroom’s color motif: “A man, don’t you agree, needs something to
look
at all that time besides white porcelain? Something wild, something gassy?”
I let Joe Ben and his wife discuss bathroom fixtures while I finished my eggs . . .
... A threat that he finally attributes to the fear he had as a child of being forced to eat a raw egg . . . (from Hank’s shoulder the little boy gave his mother a last entreating look, but she said only, “Have fun, Leland.”) and to the fact that Hank is obviously still quite upset. . . .
Joe was in high spirits even for Joe. He had missed the hostilities last night and had gone to bed ignorant of the redeclaration of the cold war between Hank and me, and had spent a night dreaming visionary dreams of brotherhood while his relatives wrangled below Joe’s Utopia: a color-filled world of garlands and maypoles, of bluebirds and marigolds, where Man Is Good to His Brother Simply Because It Is More Fun. Poor fool Joe with your Tinker Toy mind and scrambled world . . . The story is told that when Joe was a child his cousins emptied his Christmas stocking and replaced the gifts with horse manure. Joe took one look and bolted for the door, eyes glittering with excitement. “Wait, Joe, where you going? What did ol’ Santa bring you?” According to the story Joe paused at the door for a piece of rope. “Brought me a bran’-new pony but he got away. I’ll catch ’em if I hurry.”
And ever since then it seemed that Joe had been accepting more than his share of hardship as good fortune, and more than his share of shit as a sign of Shetland ponies just around the corner, Thoroughbred stallions just up the road. Were one to show him that the horses didn’t exist, never had existed, only the joke, only the shit, he would have thanked the giver for the fertilizer and started a vegetable garden. Were I to tell him I wanted to ride to church with him solely to complete my rendezvous with Viv he would have rejoiced that I was cementing relations with Hank by becoming better friends with his wife.
Lee sees Hank glance briefly at him from behind the paper; eyes troubled and mouth searching for a kind and prudent phrase that will make everything all right again. He cannot find it. The mouth closes in defeat, and before the paper is lifted again Lee sees an expression of helplessness that makes him feel both elated and somewhat troubled. . . .
But I liked the little gnome too much to risk the truth with him. What I
did
tell him: “I don’t mind, Joe, waiting till dark to come home. Besides, I think I heard—didn’t I hear you say, Viv, that you were thinking about driving in for low tide this afternoon after some clams?”
Viv sat darning socks on a chrome kitchen stool with the toes of her tennis shoes hooked under a gleaming rung and a sock pulled over a light bulb. She drew the needle through the knot and brought the thread to her gleaming row of sharp little teeth
Snip!
“Not clams, Lee”—guardedly, looking into her darning box for another sock—“rock oysters. Yes. I mentioned that I might be coming in, but I don’t know . . .” She looked toward Hank. The newspaper rustled across the table, straining its newsprint eardrums.
“Can I ride back with you? If you do come in?”
“Shall I pick you up at Joe and Jan’s new house or where? If I do?”
“That’ll be fine.”
She slid the bulb into another sock; a GE eye winked at me slyly from a woolen rim.
“So . . .” I had a date. I stood up from the table. “Ready when you are, Joe.”
“Right. You kids! Squeaks, get the kids in the boat. Get all your stuff. Hup! Hup!”
Wink.
The eye was gradually stitched closed with white woolen eyelashes.
Snip.
“So I guess I’ll see you later, Lee?” she asked with tense indifference and a white woolen thread hanging from her lip.
“Yeah, I guess.” I yawned over my shoulder as I followed Joe out of the kitchen. “Later”—and yawned again: I could be as indifferent as they come.
For a second, after Hank returns to his newspaper, unable to go through with his start, Lee longs to run to his brother and ask for his forgiveness and his help: Hank, pull me up! save me! don’t let me die down here like an insect! (The little boy turned from his mother. “Hank, I’m awful tired—” Hank knuckled the boy’s head. “Don’t be a sissy now, sport—ol’ Hankus’ll keep the dark from gettin’ you.”)—but decides instead: The devil with him; what does he care? and clamps his jaw indignantly . . .
In the front room Hank asked if I was planning on staying in town a while to hobnob with the hobgoblins after church. I told him I might, yes; he grinned—“Little of God, then a little of ghosts, is that it, bub?” as though our unfortunate argument were forgotten. “Well . . . keep a tight hold on it.”
As a matter of fact, I thought, leaving the house, when it comes to being tensely indifferent, all three of us can swing it pretty skillfully . . .
In the daylight sky outside, Lee finds the full moon waiting, like one who has stayed up all night to see the action and is not going to miss it now (“If you’re ever gonna get through this ol’ world,” Hank told the child as they left the house, “you’re gonna have to get big enough to take the dark of it.”)—a daylight moon, staring at him even more fiercely than had the plate of eggs—and his indignation begins to quickly melt . . .
As we drove the road to town, Joe was so enthusiastic at the prospect of a convert that he took it upon himself to relate to me the tale of how
he
came to be saved. . . . “Come at me one night in a
dream!
” he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the pick-up’s roar; though all the noise—the throb of the tires on the pavement, the kids in back hooting Halloween horns and twirling ratchet-clattering noisemakers—somehow added to the effect of his tale. “Just like it come to David an’ them others. All day, all week, we’d been working a piece of swamp up a good deal north of here—oh, let me see, this was a good seven, eight years back, weren’t it, Jan? When I got the call told me to join the church? In the early part of spring—and the wind had been blowin’ to take the hair right off your head. It ain’t so dangerous cutting in the wind as some say, especially you keep a good track of what’s what . . . check for snags with high limbs that might bust off and like that—I ever tell you about Judy Stamper? Aaron’s little grandkid? She was just walking along one day, through the state park back up river it was, too, and got hammered flat by a spruce limb. In a
state park
, by gosh! Her mom and dad up and left the country for keeps. Like to kilt ol’ Aaron. Wasn’t exceptional windy, neithers, nice summer day—they was out picknickin’—she just left the picnic table a second to go off behind the bushes to see a man about a dog and
kerwhack
, just like that, dead as a door-nail . . . Man!”
He sat soberly shaking his head over the tragedy, until he recalled the story from which he had digressed. “But,
oh
yeah!” A wide white smile flashed from his orange face and he went on with the tale.
“It’d been windy, like I said, an’ that night when I went off to sleep I had this
dream
like I was up topping this spar and the wind commenced to
blow
and
blow
till wasn’t a thing still;
everything
whirling this way and that and a great . . . big . . . voice booms out
Joe Ben . . . Joe Ben, thou must be saved
and I said sure sure ain’t I been planning to all along? but let me first get this here tree topped we’re running way behind and here it is
March!
So I go back to chopping . . . and that wind cranks up a notch. And the voice comes again:
Joe Ben, Joe Ben, go get yourself saved
and I says okay can you just hang on a second for chrissakes? Can’t you see I’m bustin’ my butt hurryin’? And went to choppin’ again. And then the wind
really
cut loose! If it’d been blowing before, it was just warming up. Trees come loose outa the ground and walked around the countryside like dancers; houses went to whippin’ past in the air; big old geese came zipping by
backwards
. . . . And there I am, blowed out from that tree stiff at an angle, hanging with just my fingernails. Flapping like a flag.
Joe Ben, Joe Ben—go get
—But that was enough for me. I jumped right up in bed.”
“That’s right,” Jan confirmed. “He did jump right up in bed. In March.”
“And I says, ‘Jan, get up an’ get on your clothes. We’re gonna be
saved!
’ ”
“That’s right. That’s just what he said. To get up an’—”
“Yeah, just like that. We were livin’ in the old Atkins place at the time, down river—just made a down payment on it, you recall, Jan? Couple months later, Lee, the old crackerbox just jumped in the river like a
frog.
Just one day
kersplash!
I swear, I no more thought it would cave off like that than I thought it could fly! But she did. Jan lost her mama’s antique spinet piano, too.”
“It did. I’d nearly forgot that. Just like a frog it—”
“So right the next day I went to see Brother Walker.”
“After your house was lost?” I was a little confused by the chronology of his narrative. “Or after—”
“Oh no, I mean right after
The Dream!
And let me tell you. You want to hear something make your hair stand up on end? As soon, the very
instant
I took them vows, the
very instant
I took them vows and
drunk
that water diluted right from the River Jordan, you know what taken place? You know what?”
I laughed and told him I would be afraid to guess.
“Jan, she got pregnant with our firstborn is just exactly what!”
“That’s so. I did. Right after.”
“
Right
after,” he emphasized.
“Incredible,” I marveled. “It’s hard to imagine an elixir of such potency. She became pregnant the
moment
after you drank the diluted water?”
“Yes sir! The very instant.”
“I’d have given something to witness that event.”
“Oh, man, the Strength of the Lord is a Caution.” Joe shook his head respectfully. “Like Brother Walker tell us, ‘God is a Highballer in Heaven.’ A highballer, see, is a old loggin’ term for a guy who did about twice as much as others. ‘A Highballer in Heaven with a Lowballer in Hell!’ That’s the kind of talk Brother Walker uses, Leland; he doesn’t come on with a lot of this highhanded crap other preachers talk. He lays ’em right on the
line!
”
“That’s so.
Right
on the line.”
The pale daylight moon darts along through the trees, keeping them in sight. That drivel about men being affected by the full moon—wolfbane and so on—is nonsense, complete nonsense . . .
Joe and his wife continued talking about their church all the way in to Wakonda. I had planned to beg off attending the services by developing a sudden headache, but Joe’s enthusiasm was such that I couldn’t disappoint him and was compelled to accompany him to the carnival grounds, where a huge two-masted maroon tent housed his version of God. We were early. The folding chairs placed in neat rows about the bright wood-shaving-strewn interior of the tent were only partly filled with long-jowled fishermen or loggers, haunted by their own dreams of windy death. Joe and Jan insisted on taking their usual seats in the front row. “Where Brother Walker really gets his teeth into you, Leland; c’mon.” But I declined, saying I would feel conspicuous. “And, as I am a newcomer in the Lord’s tent, Joe, I think it might be best to try my first sample of this potent new faith from the back row, out of reach of the good brother’s molars, all right?”
And from this vantage point I was able to slip up the aisle a few minutes after services jumped off, without disturbing the worship of the red-faced believers or the rock-and-roll catechism that Brother Walker’s blind wife was whanging out on her electric steel guitar. I got out of that tent just in time.